The Effect of Policy Practices on Mathematical Achievement of Students: A Country-Fixed Hierarchical Model of OECD Countries

Introduction:

From school-choice expansion, class-size reduction, and teacher specialization, to school-climate indices, pedagogical innovations, and performance feedback, measures pioneered by OECD countries are well documented for their merits, given their separate lines of research. As not every country has the luxury of implementing everything, this study aims to help policymakers in less-privileged education systems make informed decisions about which measures to prioritize by measuring outcomes across legislative perspectives.

Method:

To control for country heterogeneity, a country-fixed hierarchical model was employed to estimate the production output of various OECD-adopted instructional practices on PISA 2022’s featured math test scores of students. To achieve a balanced dataset while complying with the 20% missingness threshold for data imputation, the final model comprised data from 179,168 students across 6,810 schools in 23 OECD education systems, using 13 measurement proxies (school type and size, class size, school and classroom climate, teacher training, ability grouping, reasoning-fostering and thinking-encouraging pedagogy, teacher support, student feedback, student gender, and SES).

Results:

Nine variables had a positive impact on math scores of students: student SES (22.78), class size (7.94), classroom climate (6.48), school size (6.15), teacher support (5.77), reasoning-fostering pedagogy (5.33), no ability grouping (3.39), math teacher training (2.77), and private enrollment (1.59). Four variables were negative predictors of student math scores: negative school climate (-18.02), thinking-encouraging pedagogy (-8.35), female (-6.05), and student feedback (-1.59).

Conclusion:

Compared to pedagogical approaches whose effects are contradictory, students in large non-ability-grouping math classes with supportive teachers under a positive classroom and school climate appear to have an edge over their counterparts. As students’ math performance improves with their SES (socioeconomic status) and private enrollment, privatizing school choices may be a worthy policy to help disadvantaged students excel.